Social Media

E-Textbook Maker Kno Launches Facebook App

After Kno gave up on its textbook ereader earlier this year, it was left with a digital textbook software that had little distinction from others on the market. On Wednesday, it announced the first of its efforts to snazz up its platform — including a Facebook app.

The app gives readers access to their books through the social platform. Kno is the first of major players to offer such an app, but it's done so in a rather underwhelming way. The Facebook app is essentially a version of the iPad app made accessible through Facebook, and both include a feature that allows readers to post directly to their walls from the text.

"I'd like to emphasize that this is a first step," says Kno Vice President of Marketing Ousama Haffar.

Facebook is an interesting point for to Kno to start its social strategy. Other textbook companies have done so, mostly apart from established platforms. Follett-owned CafeScribe, for instance, allows students to join groups that pool their notes with others in the same class or share them with others who own the same book across the platform.

Outside of the textbook realm, digital book maker Kobo has created a social reading platform for the iPad that it says it will bring to all of its platforms. The platform allows readers to check in with characters and places on Facebook, earn badges and track reading traffics — sharing to social networks like Facebook at every step. No doubt there are many interesting directions Kno could take for approaching its social features from the basic app it launched on Wednesday.

Kno's other new features for the iPad app are called "Quizme" and "Journal." The first instantly creates multiple-choice quizzes for iPad app users by blacking out the labels in diagrams, and the second compiles a student's notes and highlighted items into one easy-to-review packet.

Both are less-than-standard features for textbooks, but somewhat minor additions to the app. There are, however, examples of what Kno has planned for its overall strategy. Some textbook publishers have stayed clear of bells and whistles that make books hard to digitize in mass numbers. Others, like Inkling, build books from the ground up in order to create unique interactive experiences. For obvious reasons, the later group has a harder time building an inventory.

Kno is aiming for some point in the middle. Like CourseSmart or Amazon, they digitize books that can be highlighted, bookmarked and "written in" without building them from scratch and charging a premium fee. But it is also trying to add as much of the interactivity as it can without doing so manually or giving up its price tags of about 30%-50% the cost of physical books.

"If you want to be a company that changes an industry, you need the content," Haffar says. "If you don't have the content, it's just something that's kind of cool."

From left to right, Kno's Quizme feature, Journal feature and course manager

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